The Mind Of A Modern Mass Murderer

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I have been spending a lot of time in this column trying to hone in on the causes of mass murder, if only because it is a topic that, because of the havoc that is being wreaked today, requires our urgent attention.   So, in the present article, I am going to focus on the problem from still another perspective: what goes on in a person’s mind when he decides to run amok.  And I am going to compare the thought processes in a violent person’s mind today in modern technological society to comparable thought processes of a very rageful person in a more traditional natural society.  

I have talked about how the world of a person’s mind reflects the stimulus patterns of the external world which surrounds him.  In a traditional natural society, a person is surrounded by flowing blendable continual organic stimuli.  It is a situation where the forms of the objects or entities from which the stimuli emanate are so overpowered at times by the presence of the stimuli that they, the forms, seem to lose their definition.  This is particularly true in areas of very intense vegetation like rain forests and jungles.  But it is also present in villages on market days where people mingle in close quarters hawking and purchasing produce, meat and wares.  Any place where there is a lot of rich organic stimulation from a natural backdrop or where there is a lot of rich primary experience among people who are grounded in a more natural living environment is a place where the organic stimuli emanating from the objects or entities there have the capacity to create stimulus overload for the people living in such surroundings.

In other words, the intense immediacy of this organic stimuli is so overpowering, so overwhelming, that it makes a person feel as if he is going to explode.  The only way that a person can get rid of these feelings is by projecting them outward, finding a person or persons on whom he can focus and then release all of this explosive energy.  Hence, the foundational source of violent behavior in a traditional natural society. This doesn’t mean that cognition-based motivations don’t play a role in setting the stage for violent actions.  However, I would submit that frequently they are public excuses that give a person permission to himself to funnel his unwieldy aggressive energy outside of himself and onto other people in such a way that it can be safely disposed of without hurting him.  In other words, the aggressive energy exists before the cognitive reasons to support expressing it.  Also, to the people around him, it makes him look better if he has a reason for his violent outbreak, as if, in spite of his explosive behavior, he is really in control of himself.  Without the layer of cognitive reasoning, he comes off as a wild animal.


Violence in a modern technological society reflects a totally different stimulus pattern.  Here, rather than a situation where the stimuli overpower the objects and entities from which they emanate and thus blurring their forms, we today have a situation where the forms overpower the stimuli.  The stimuli are not so strong that there is shape-shifting as there is in a traditional natural society.  The defined discrete stimuli that dominate today are truer reflections of the objects and entities from which they emanate.  In the case of data or pixels, the stimuli are the entities.  When the stimuli emanate out, they take the entities and their forms with them.  Unlike the stimuli in the traditional natural societies, they are not grounded.  They float in a vacuum randomly where they knock against each other.  The minds of people today have increasingly become numb experiential vacuums filled with lots of random data that knock against each other.  A mass murderer pulls out of his numbness when enough random data knock against each other in his mind such that they generate enough abrasive stimulation to form a tension-pocket, enough to want to project the stimuli outward towards other human beings.  Unlike with the target people in more traditional natural environments, the target people in modern technological environments are not blurred with the stimuli of lots of organic passionate emotion.  Rather, the target people in modern technological living environments are attacked experientially by mediated tension-pockets – modern weapons such as semi-automatic assault weapons.  Because the numb attacker is incapable of generating a lot of passionate emotion inside himself to carry out his deeds, he is pushed forward by abrasive tension-pocket stimuli from without.  Finally, the remote attacker is incapable of really experiencing his attack as a primary experience. Rather, he experiences it as an explosive tension-pocket surrounded by a remote numb mediated event with which he only feels a very weak emotional attachment.  And it is because of his weak emotional attachment to the event that he is not so overwhelmed by the enormity of what he is doing that he becomes too paralyzed to carry out his mass murder.

© 2023 Laurence Mesirow

Acerca de Laurence Mesirow

Durante mi estadía en la Ciudad de México en los años setenta, me di cuenta que esta enorme ciudad contenía en sus colonias distintos "medio ambientes vivenciales", que iban desde muy antiguas a muy recientes; desde muy primitivas a muy modernas.Observé que había diferencias sutiles en la conducta de la gente y en sus interacciones en las diferentes colonias. Esta observación fue fundamental en la fundación de mis teorías con respecto a los efectos de la tecnología moderna sobre los medio ambientes vivenciales y sobre la conducta humana.En México, publiqué mi libro "Paisaje Sin Terreno" (Editorial Pax-México), y luego di conferencias para la U.N.A.M. y la Universidad Anahuac. También, presenté un ensayo para un Congreso de Psicología.Ahora que mis hijas son adultas, tengo el tiempo de explorar mis ideas de vuelta. Le agradezco mucho a ForoJudio.com y en especial al Sr. Daniel Ajzen por la oportunidad de presentar mis ideas.

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